Scientists tell coastal cities to armor up for next superstorm

If coastal scientists had their way, Eastern cities from Norfolk to New York would begin armoring up now against the next superstorm and tidal surges that will only get more devastating as ocean temperatures warm and sea levels rise.

With enough political will and funding, they said, communities could begin studying and building sea gates or other surge defenses to withstand inundation from superstorms like Sandy, which ravaged New Jersey and New York on Monday.

"They're going to be stronger and stronger," oceanography professor William Boicourt said of the new generation of superstorms. "We need to mitigate this stuff really quickly. We have to have short-term mitigation … while we do the larger, long-term solution of reducing carbon emissions. That doesn't mean we wait long-term to act."

Boicourt is with the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Sciences and one of a trio of experts who called a telephone press conference Friday to warn about the growing threat of global warming and Sandy-scale hurricanes to the Chesapeake region.

Measuring 1,000 miles across, Sandy was the largest hurricane known to make landfall that far north on the East Coast.

"Unfortunately, unless we quickly solve the climate crisis, a super-hurricane will eventually strike coastal Maryland and Virginia," said author and hurricane expert Mike Tidwell.

Other countries began to act years ago to counter the impacts of tidal surges or flooding on coastal cities, they said. Great Britain engineered a barrier flood gate on the Thames River downstream from London after a catastrophic storm in the 1950s, the Netherlands has its sea walls and Venice is finishing up a $10 billion system of mechanical flood gates installed to save the ancient city.

"Almost all triggered by human tragedies," said Tidwell. "Significant death and property destruction."

With damage estimates from Sandy now at $50 billion, he added, this country may be reaching the "dollar threshold that makes adaptation start to seem cost-effective."

Computer models have long been projecting rising seas as global warming melts ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, with the greatest relative rise projected in Hampton Roads. This year saw "unprecedented" melting of land glaciers in Greenland, said Court Stevenson, a professor of coastal ecology and sea-level rise with the Center for Environmental Sciences.

Recent research by John Boon, emeritus professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester Point, projects a two-foot increase in sea level in Hampton Roads by 2050.

Climate scientists have warned that warmer ocean surfaces and higher sea levels could spark more intense Atlantic hurricanes and greater coastal inundation. In that sense, said Tidwell, those systemic influences did cause Hurricane Sandy.

"We as scientists always caution you can't link one storm to climate change," said Boicourt, adding he'd just returned from a two-day conference in Baltimore of the country's leading forecasters. "But the consensus of our gathering was more than — the elephant in the room is — this is the beginning of what we're going to expect."

It's up to each coastal community or region to determine the best way to adapt, the experts said.

"A lot of Norfolk is just about at sea level now — some three or four feet higher than sea level," said Stevenson. "They're really trying to come to grips with a kind of revetment system there. Whether they need a gate is up in the air. They're very much concerned about flooding because of all the naval operations there."

The concern is justified, he said, since "it seems like we're not doing very much globally about carbon emissions. In fact, we're doing just the opposite."

"It's a question of political will," said Boicourt. "Sometimes you feel a little bit crass using tragedies to try to crank up political will, but it's so frustrating with this political season and decade and century.

"We can't point out how much the total costs of global warming will be — we know they're large," he added. "How can we communicate to our representatives that money up front may involve revenue-raising to pay for it. These are scientists crying out for a concerted effort."